Hurricane Katrina altered demographic picture in New Orleans area

After thousands of individual decisions to stay or go, years of grueling work, and tens of billions in investment, a slightly reconfigured New Orleans has emerged from the ruins left by Hurricane Katrina and the levee failures the storm triggered five years ago.

View full sizePat Sullivan, The Associated PressHurricane Katrina evacuees at the Houston Astrodome were photographed on Sept. 3, 2005.

New Orleans has not become a Disneyfied version of its former self, as some residents feared when the first wave of planners arrived in early 2006 eager to re-imagine the city.

But neither does it look quite like it did on Aug. 28, 2005.

Demographers and data-miners tracking New Orleans’ recovery help sketch the New Orleans of 2010.

In quick strokes:

The city is about 22 percent smaller, and not quite so poor.

It remains a predominantly African-American city, although not as demonstrably as before, with its African-American majority dropping from about 67 percent to 61 percent.

The suburbs are different. St. Tammany has grown by an estimated 8 percent since the storm, and St. Bernard and Plaquemines have lost about 37 percent and 15 percent of their populations respectively, according to census data gathered by the Greater New Orleans Community Data Center.

According to center, average wages and median household income around the region are both up, although both improvements are relative, owing much to the traumatic amputation of 125,000 mostly poor residents scattered to other cities.

Suburbanization of poverty

That exodus from the region’s core has produced another novel feature, the so-called “suburbanization of poverty.”

Economically, the region works like it did before the storm, still supported on the tripod of tourism, oil and gas and shipping.

The flood of rebuilding money so far has significantly insulated the local economy from the worst effects of the recent recession, which has struck the rest of the country harder than metro New Orleans.

For businesses, “It’s been an uneven recovery,” said Bob Brown, managing director of the Business Council of New Orleans and the River Region.

“There are parts of the business community that have righted themselves and are moving on with things as good as, or better than, before the storm,” Brown said.

At the same time, some sectors, like the city’s hospitality industry, remain nervous, “knowing the slightest dislocation can throw things off-stride again.”

Less affordable than ever

Yet, even rebuilt, a city that is relatively wealthier than it once was remains poor in absolute numbers.

Half of New Orleans residents are officially “low-income,” living within 200 percent of the federal poverty level.

And a city that could be cruel to its poor before Katrina is, unhappily, even more so now, planners say.

As it was before, New Orleans remains predominantly a city of poor renters.

But since Katrina, the region has become less affordable than ever, said Greg Rigamer, whose technology company, GCR and Associates, tracks economic, geographic and other trends by synthesizing streams of disparate data.

The cost of rebuilding and insuring thousands of ruined apartments has jacked rents out of reach for many.

Even with vacancy rates around 15 percent, the market rent for a two-bedroom apartment in New Orleans has jumped from $661 pre-Katrina to $982 per month, Rigamer said.

That’s so high that the cost of shelter takes a bigger bite of the median paycheck in New Orleans than in New York City, northern New Jersey and Long Island, he said.

For people drawing typical salaries across a spectrum of occupations, such as sales, health care support, food and service-related industries, market rents are either burdensome or simply out of reach, Rigamer said.

Public transit in the region is still rebuilding, so people without reliable access to vehicles are also without access to work. And because the storm broke up families, parents and grandparents are no longer able to provide child care for free, said Gordon Wadge, co-president of the Archdiocese of New Orleans’ Catholic Charities, which has been a major player in post-Katrina relief.

That’s another door locked on the way out of poverty, he said.

Economic diversity lacking

Allison Plyer, a demographer with the Greater New Orleans Data Center, said the city needs to diversify its economy from its historic reliance on tourism, oil and gas and shipping, which one of the center’s recovery reports describes as “stagnant or declining legacy industries.”

In the near term, Plyer, Brown and others believe that continued reconstruction, especially the massive new LSU-Veterans Administration Hospital complex in lower Mid-City, will continue to buffer the economy for awhile — “so we’ll continue to have a little bit better job situation that other areas.”

“If we can start to transform our economy and get it moving in the right directions, essentially before for the rest of the country does, or at the same time, we can keep people,” Plyer said. “But if they beat us to the punch, people will have to leave for jobs.”

The challenge of blight

Rigamer, of GCR, believes that in addition to adding jobs, the region’s immediate challenges are reducing the overhang of blight and attracting new private investment.

He noted that in the next year or two the Road Home program will begin to approach property owners who took rebuilding money to restore their homes, but have not yet done so.

By some estimates the “non-compliance” rate may be in the region of 16 percent to 20 percent of participants.

How the state deals with those property owners — whether it has the will to enforce those covenants, whether it belatedly collects unimproved properties and what it does with those properties — will have a major effect on the future of some neighborhoods, he said.

But if in terms of physical rebuilding the New Orleans area remains a work in progress, psychologically it seems to have passed a recovery landmark.

Although they reported plenty of continuing worry — especially their distress over crime and political corruption — two-thirds said their own lives had returned to normal, and 70 percent said the rebuilding process was going in the right direction.